How to Write a Psychology Lab Report - Verywell

A psychology lab report describes an experiment and take the same format used in professional journal articles

Unformatted text preview: General Experimental Psychology Lab Report Name: Rebecca Olson Date: November 30, 2012 TITLE OF LAB EXPERIMENT OR ACTIVITY: SOCIAL FACILIATION ACTIVITY I. INTRODUCTION: Provide a brief summary (1 paragraph) of the topic. Specify the theory or principle behind the lab. The topic discussed in this lab was social facilitation. This is the tendency for people to perform simple tasks better in front of an audience. This happens as a result of the people performing the easy task being concerned with how others or their audience perceives them. This idea was investigate on two different levels: a complex task and a simple task both done alone and in front of the class. First, one group of five students went in to the hallway alone, one by one and were told to do the easy task of wrapping yarn around a ball and for them to time themselves to see how long it took them. These volunteers were then supposed to wrap the yarn again in front of the class. However, the string became unattached to the ball so this part of the lab was disregarded. Another set of five students were then asked to putt a golf ball, alone, five times with one practice shot. Once these five students were finished with putting in private in the hallway, they were brought into the classroom and asked to hit five putts also with one practice shot. The times of wrapping the rock and number of putts made were alone were compared to the results of these same activities done by in front of the class....

A psychology lab report is a paper that describes an experiment and takes the same format used in professional journal articles. If you are unsure of how a journal article is organized, look at some examples in psychology journals to get an idea of how your lab report will look.